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Description:

Short description: This session discusses in depth a wide range of indigenous decolonial methods in political ecology and geography. It capitalizes upon the need for decolonial theories and praxis especially in light of the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza and settler-colonial violence around the world. This session will explore the ways in which the physicality of war and its knowledge production dynamics, both accentuate, necessitate, makes imperative the rethinking of normative geographies and political ecologies, across Palestine and the Americas. By opening up a conversation among critical scholars, we flesh out the dynamics of decolonization as praxis.

Short panelist descriptions:

Dr.Des Saad Amira (Al-Quds Bard University) will present on: "The contentious geography and political ecology of the Palestinian frontier villages: De-colonial perspectives of the past and present"

Abstract: The Palestinian “frontier villages” were born out of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948. They bordered the no man's zone of the 1949 armistice line (green line), thus becoming a transit space for Palestinian refugees. This “border” chipped away large swathes of fertile land belonging to Palestinian villages. In certain cases, the UNRWA has given some residents half a refugee card, a special designation attesting to the destitute reality of these communities, who lost everything, including mobility, subsistence, food ways, livelihoods and, and, most importantly, peace. This liminal status drove villagers and refugees to cross the “Green line” in search of food and the retrieval of belongings from abandoned houses or even for revenge. My contribution to this roundtable will emphasize a de-colonial reading of the political ecology of these villages, by presenting some personal archives, diaries, and oral histories, which help us ground these Palestinian voices in the contentious terrain of the Post Nakba period.


Bio: Saad leads the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al Quds Bard in Palestine. Saad has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Basel, where he worked as a lecturer, and is currently revising his thesis for Publication. Saad was a visiting researcher in the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town. His research sits at the nexus between settler colonialism, political ecology and environmental violence in Palestine and the Arab region.

Dr. Omar Qassis (PhD, Central European University) will present on "Agrarian Epistemologies and Colonial Lenses."
Abstract: Colonial agriculture is high modernist agriculture (HMA). The central pillars of this ideology are radical simplification, productivity and efficiency orientated, and centralized implementation. The assumptions implicit within HMA are those of the temperate climates of Western Europe. Unfortunately, MHA does not go away with the colonial state but rather tends to be adopted by post-colonial authorities. Yet HMA’s dangers are clearer now-a-days, the question is rather how we might de-colonize our understanding of colonial agriculture and recuperate, restore, and rebuild indigenous methods. My contribution to this roundtable will emphasis how we can decolonize our view of agriculture and utilize indigenous agrarian methods to ensure sustainable, environmentally friendly, and healthy farming.

Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles will present on how settler colonialism is built upon the exploitation of Indigenous landscapes. Drawing upon the work of Sai Englert and others, this talk will draw parallels between settler colonial exploitation and expropriation of lands in Palestine and the long-standing exploitation and expropriation of Indigenous lands in Canada and the United States. Much as settler colonialism is built upon separation from and exploitation of land, the counterpoint to this is a reembracing of long-standing relationships to land and environment.

Bio: Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an Indigenous geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between climate change and Indigenous cultural/political land-based resurgence. Dr. Smiles is an adjunct professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Smiles serves as the Director of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, a community-based research group which works with Indigenous communities on place/space based research. Dr. Smiles has published widely in top journals, including Dialogues in Human Geography, Society and Natural Resources, and ACME. Besides their academic work, Dr. Smiles serves in leadership roles in the American Association of Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and serves their nation as a Trustee of Leech Lake Tribal College.

Edgar Garcia-Velozo: I will discuss a few reflections from my research process as a geography doctoral student primarily trained in Brazil navigating anglophone academia. My proposed dissertation research relies heavily on ethnographic methods with Palestinian families living in the south of Brazil. Despite not being a part of these communities, I have relationships with several members of these families as we grew up in the same neighborhoods, went to same schools, and built long-established friendships. Now, as I write my doctoral dissertation proposal, I grapple with the contradictions of doing geographic research with displaced indigenous communities as I put the hat of researcher from an U.S institution undertaking research in the global South. Drawing from Sundberg’s (2015) discussion on ‘ethics of entanglement’, I accept these contradictions and engage with geographic scholarship on decolonial geographies (Daigle and Ramírez, 2018; Radcliffe and Radhuber, 2020) as well as decolonial methods in geography (Smiles, 2023) to think through these tensions in building my research methodology in an ethical and respectful way, and preparing for fieldwork in Brazil.


Bio: Edgar Garcia-Velozo is a geography Ph.D. student and a graduate instructor at the University of Kentucky. His work focuses on the geographies of borders, migrations, and displacement. Prior to his doctoral studies in the U.S., Edgar was primarily trained as a geographer in Brazil, where his previous experiences involved researching the colonial legacies inscribed on border landscapes in South America as well as teaching middle-school geography.

Non-Presenting Participants